Historian James C. Cobb to Speak on the American South
James C. (Jim) Cobb, historian of the American South and award-winning author, will speak at Washington and Lee University on May 4 at 4:30 p.m. in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library.
Cobb will speak on “The Making, Un-Making and Re-Making of the ‘Solid South.’” His talk is free, and the public is invited.
He will give the 2016 Mellon/Griffith ’52 Visiting Professor in History Lecture, which is sponsored by the Mellon Project on History in the Public Sphere, the Robert Griffith ’52 Visiting Scholar Fund and the Class of 1960 Professorship in Ethics.
In 2015, Cobb gave the Founders Day speech and received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters at Commencement. He is a visiting professor of history at W&L for the Spring Term.
He is the B. Phinizy Spalding Professor Emeritus in the History of the American South at the University of Georgia and has written widely on the interaction between economy, society and culture in the American South. He also is the former president of the Southern Historical Society.
Cobb is the author of several books, including “The South and America Since World War II” (2010); “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity” (2005); and “The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity” (1992) and other publications.
Among his many honors are Senior Visiting Mellon Scholar at Cambridge University; the McClemore Prize, awarded by the Mississippi Historical Society for his book on Mississippi history; two Green-Ramsdell Awards by the Journal of South History; the Georgia Historical Quarterly’s E. Merton Coulter Award; and an Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship.
